Where are all the healers?

[Ghishlain]

Unfortunately, this game doesn't really allow multiple effective play styles for any job. You can't really choose to be a healer who only heals any more than you can choose to be a pacifist PLD (only uses flash, provokes and defensive cooldowns), a pure DPS WAR, a pure DPS BRD or an ice mage. You can't even choose a class over a job. Of course you can choose to play however you want when you're solo, but in group content people tend to expect you to play your job in a way that's known to be the most effective (this doesn't mean you're expected to perform super well but that you're expected to follow the common play style for that job). I also don't think it's unfair to expect your team members to try to play their jobs in a way that's the most beneficial for the team (again, not expecting optimal performance, just effort to be helpful).

To me, it's less about the fact that no-DPS healers are not efficient or effective and more about the fact that disparaging comments towards no-DPS players (and likewise towards pro-DPS players) leads to healers just wanting to not play healer.

A no-DPS healer, who's still fulfilling their primary role, is still performing to the point where you're completing the duty. You're not completing it to the speed at which you could if you had a pro-DPS player but you're still completing the duty and thus "not failing" and this is the metric we should be gauging baseline performance on.

I'm not saying you, the person I'm replying to is doing this, but by claiming no-DPS healers are bad, terrible, need to be kicked just leads to people not wanting to play the class if they risk running into animosity like that. That's why we're running into a lack of healers - either healers just don't want to heal anymore or they're just healing with their friends to avoid this animosity, leaving to a lower overall PuG pool to work with.